Friday, November 7, 2014

ENTANGLED is out in paperback now, and Presenting Lenore is today's stop on the blog tour to celebrate it. I read ENTANGLED over the weekend and I loved the mix of science and music. Amy has such an inventive use of language and the story speaks to our need as humans for connecting with others.

Here's the summary:

ENTANGLED is the story of seventeen-year-old Cade, a fierce survivor who lives solo in the universe with her cherry-red guitar until she finds out she was created in a lab in the year 3112, then entangled at a subatomic level with a boy named Xan. Cade’s quest to locate Xan joins her with an array of outlaws on a galaxy-spanning adventure. And once Cade discovers the wild joy of real connection, there’s no turning back.

The rest of Cade’s story is coming in UNMADE, which hits shelves January 13!

And here's Amy!

I’ve always loved science fiction.

But the truth is nerdier than that: I’ve always loved science.

Whenever I play the “what would you have done with your life if you weren’t doing this?” game, I only have one answer. Scientist. BOOM. Easy. A lot of people see writing and science on opposite ends of a spectrum of What People Do, but I don’t think of it that way. Science and writing are focused ways of looking at the world where you don’t get to take anything for granted.

And no matter how weird creative writing can get, science is ALWAYS weirder.

Seriously, there is no way to top the strangeness of our own world. Writing has to follow WAY more rules than nature. Nature might have inherent patterns, but it also delights in breaking them, and coming up with more variety and just plain oddity than a single person could ever do if you stuck them in a bare room with a notebook and said, “Now make up the whole world.”

Take quantum entanglement.

Quantum entanglement is one of the weirdest things in all of the vast weirdness of science. It’s what happens when two particles start talking to each other. Across impossible distances. They interact in ways that break ALL of the rules.

So of course, as a writer, I heard that, and my metaphor-making brain kicked in. What if it was people instead of particles having these weird and intense interactions across impossible distances?! I was lucky, because I already had a character wandering around in my brain, in need of just such a bit of science. Cade already had a crappy home planet and a loudloud guitar. All she needed was a plot!

As soon as I used quantum entanglement to connect Cade to a strange boy far across the universe, things really started to heat up. I used some of the details of entanglement to add specifics to the way they interact. Of course, I also fictionalized and stretched the idea. A lot. But if it’s within the realm of human imagination, it’s probably within the realm of scientific possibility.

Do you know how many inventions have been predicted by science fiction? SO MANY. This is the moment where I remind you that we currently have hovercraft technology! HOVERCRAFTS, people. And scientists are talking about bending space-time around a spaceship! (WARP DRIVE, people.) And…

(Thirty minutes of nerding out redacted.)

Here’s a funny thing that I’ve noticed. Some of the people who’ve picked up ENTANGLED have assumed that quantum entanglement isn’t real—that I just made it up. And I can’t really blame them. It just SOUNDS so fictional. It sounds more than fictional, actually. It sounds bananas.

But it’s real. And to me, that was too incredible NOT to write about.

Want to know more about science and fiction colliding in ENTANGLED? Watch the EXCLUSIVE excerpt!